In a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, uplink/downlink data scheduling between a base station (eNB, eNodeB) and user equipment (UE) is implemented in a one-to-one scheduling manner by using a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) or an enhanced physical downlink control channel E-PDCCH. However, as a quantity of UEs, and a quantity of UEs concurrently accessing a same eNB continuously increase, a huge challenge to capacity of a physical downlink control channel used for data scheduling is generated.
In the current LTE system, a method for optimizing overheads of a control channel includes an uplink contention transmission solution based on group scheduling. The group scheduling is to determine a plurality of user equipments served by a same carrier unit as user equipments in a same resource group, and the plurality of user equipments in the same resource group correspond to one contention based uplink grant (CB-grant) scheduling instruction. In the solution, an eNB schedules uplink transmission of the plurality of UEs in the same contention transmission resource group by using a CB-grant, and distinguishes data of the UEs by using demodulation reference signals of the UEs. In this way, scheduling overheads of the UEs are reduced.
However, although an uplink contention transmission manner based on group scheduling can effectively alleviate an overhead problem of the control channel, when a PDCCH signaling format 0/4 is used for the scheduling instruction, power control of the plurality of user equipments served by the same carrier unit cannot be configured. If a PDCCH signaling format 3/3a is used for the scheduling instruction to configure power control based on a user in a contention area, complexity of blind detection on the user in the contention area is increased, and overheads of control signaling are also increased.